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The playable form of the thing this dictionary is built around. Guess the count, then the word opens up: the split, the stressed syllable inked, the IPA, the respelling and why the stress sits there.
Syllable split is a free syllable counting game with 30 rounds: 5 words at each length from one syllable to 6. Guess the count and the word opens up — the split, the stressed syllable inked, the IPA, the respelling and one sentence on why the stress sits where it does. Every count is read from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so nothing here is a syllable count guessed from spelling.
How many syllables does this word have?
How many syllables does this word have?
discreet
Tab to move between the six, Enter or Space to choose. Keys 1 to 6 work too.
Read the word, then say it under your breath. Counting beats out loud is more accurate than counting vowels on the page — English spells more vowels than it says.
Press the number of syllables you heard, from 1 to 6. Click a tile, press its number key, or Tab to it and press Enter.
The round settles on your first press. There is no second guess.
Read the split. The stressed syllable is inked and raised, so the beat is visible rather than something you decode from a mark you half remember.
Read the note underneath it. Where a suffix rule fixes the stress, the rule is named — and it is only named when the word in front of you actually obeys it.
All 30 words, their splits, their transcriptions and their stress notes are in the page when it loads. Nothing is fetched between rounds, so the game behaves the same on a slow connection as on a fast one.
Candidates are drawn from 9 collections — the everyday ones, plus the sound-shaped ones: one-syllable words, five-syllable words, words stressed on the last beat, words spelled nothing like they are said. Left to the everyday collections alone the draw is almost all one- and two-syllable words, because that is what English mostly is, and a six-button game would not be worth six buttons. 3,098 single words in commonness band 3 or higher, with a recorded syllable count of 6 or fewer, clear the first pass.
An even slice across the six lengths gives 204 candidates to read in full, and 197 of those survive the test that matters: a real entry in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, carrying IPA, a respelling, a split whose parts match the recorded count, and a stress position inside that split. Entries whose division was derived from spelling because CMU has never heard of the word are thrown out — asking a player to guess a number we ourselves guessed would make the wrong answer indefensible.
The 30 that become rounds are the first 5 at each length in hash order, so the set is fixed rather than sampled and comes back identical on every build. The stress note is written from the word’s own ending and its recorded stress: a suffix rule is quoted only when the recorded stress is where the rule predicts, and otherwise the note describes the position and claims nothing more.
The words, definitions and semantic fields in this game come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Syllable splits, stress and IPA come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness bands are measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.